Hard drive very SLOW!!!!!

[Dudefoxlive]

HI, my friend gave me a laptop to fix and he said that he had gotten a virus on it at one point and it has been a few years sense he has used it i think.  After lots of looking he seems to have removed it because i can not find much of anything on the hard drive where a virus might be hiding or at least in the most common locations.  Program Files, Temp Folders, etc.  so here is the symptom the laptop works but the hard drive is painfully slow to the point it takes about 5 minuets to boot windows and even longer to load explorer.  i had to do a system restore because windows would not load before and i can now get into windows but as i said before painfully slow.  i have looked at the fragmentation of the disk and it said there was no fragmentation which i find very weird.  i am running a check disk to see if it can help me in any way but i forgot to check both boxes so i will have to run it again later on.  any body got an idea on whats going on? 

[Gonio]

Probably just a slow HDD. A OS slows down after several years aswell because of junk. A fresh install or even better a simple SSD with new install could make it better. How full is the drive?

[Dudefoxlive]

not very full.  it has a 500GB HDD but only about maybe 100GB is used.  he said he had a virus on it at one point and i think some left overs from it might be part of the problem.  even in my live disks it is still as slow.  it is acting like a bad hard drive but all my software reports the drive as healthy. anything else?

[DraconicFire98]

might have to reinstall windows, my sister's laptop is showing the same symptoms, and using a (defective) hard drive of the same speed and size shows that it is much faster than it is on the stock install

 

5400rpm 500GB

[Dudefoxlive]

i hope that i can use the recovery partition on it as i don't want to have to do a full manual reinstall if i can help it.  that was actually my first plan.  Get his files and other stuff off and reset the laptop.  i don't think i will have a choice but at the speed that the system is running i am not sure i will be able to do that as easily.  check disk is only moving at like 10 index entries every time it refreshs so by the time i get home from school it should be done but OMG this is painful to watch.  i dont think i am gonna have a choich though about reinstalling windows. 

[Gonio]

A recovery is something you can try first, but I doubt that will improve a lot.

[Dudefoxlive]

Worth a try at the least.  Have to back up his files first of all but i hope that i can at least get the system more responsive than what it is now.  

[Dudefoxlive]

just an update.  i am slowly coping the files off the hard drive then i am going to try and reset the machine.  just a quick question to all that are following.  who thinks this is not gonna make any improvement at all?  i am starting to get that feeling but one may never know till he tries.

[Gonio]

On 11-1-2017 at 0:14 PM, Gonio said:

A recovery is something you can try first, but I doubt that will improve a lot.

I do But would be better if it helps. SLLLLLOOOOOWWWW is not nice... Like my internet requiring google to load

[Dudefoxlive]

well once i get home from school i am going to have the laptop do the factory reset.  i got the files off the laptop and back to the owner so i dont have to worry about that.  and i also have something that might be a little interesting to look at.  look at the image attachment.  something is really wrong with this windows install as these have also started happening out of random. 

[Dudefoxlive]

new problem.  told the gateway recovery manager program to do the factory reset from within windows and now it tried to boot to the recovery partition on the hard drive but every time it tries i get an unexpected I/O error has occurred.  i want to use the factory install of windows as reinstalling windows manually is such a pain in the bum.  any ideas on what i can do to fix this?  if i have too i will have the owner contact acer/gateway and see if we can get some recovery disks or something from them. 

[Dudefoxlive]

does anyone have an idea as what check disk will do to the recovery partition if i run it?  some say it will fix my issue but if it wont then i dont want to try it.

[Dudefoxlive]

never mind as i simply put in my windows disk and it fixed all the problems now for the reset.

 

[Coldfuson]

11 minutes ago, Dudefoxlive said:

never mind as i simply put in my windows disk and it fixed all the problems now for the reset.

 

before going through all that trouble I would have suggested running a more intensive HDD test. It sounds like the only results youve gotten so far are from SMART. and while good, it doesn't catch some really big crashes. 

[Dudefoxlive]

well right now i am having problems with running the recovery program as last night it ran fine and wanted me to reset the machine like i had told it to do but now when i run it i get the tool failed to run.  try selecting another option.  i am going to use my windows 7 disk to run check disk and hope that might do something as i had an error for recovery.dat.  hope at the very least that it might get it working again.

Edited January 13, 2017 by Dudefoxlive
Pic of error

[mrchow19910319]

If I were you I will back up the files, take out the harddrive, connect it to your own pc. Format the damn thing. And put it back in then do a fresh install of windows.

[Dudefoxlive]

49 minutes ago, mrchow19910319 said:

If I were you I will back up the files, take out the harddrive, connect it to your own pc. Format the damn thing. And put it back in then do a fresh install of windows.

agree but sense there might still be a way to get the recovery pertition working correctly again then i am going to try that before i go as far as manually reinstalling windows.  but i will say one thing i am very close to that point but not there yet.  also your qoute under your post (if it is not broken, let's fix till it is).  that is basically what i did LOL.  how did you know???

[mrchow19910319]

1 minute ago, Dudefoxlive said:

 

K. I recommend that solution because I have NO IDEA what the heck are recovery partition and how to use it. 

Encountered a couple of problems b4, reinstall the OS always fix it. 

[Dudefoxlive]

well if i can't get the recovery partition working then i am just gonna reinstall windows manually.  also do you really not know what a recovery partition is????? 

[Dudefoxlive]

Well ran check disk and it worked.  

[Dudefoxlive]

well after all this it turns out that the drive is most likely dying as i formatted it and i am still getting the same result.  at least 500 GB hard drives are mostly cheap now these days.

[AbstractAlbino]

Before you run and buy a new hdd/ssd make sure you do a clean format (not the one providing in windows it just filling your hd with zeros and ones). A secure format using programs like partedmagic or any other program giving you a full and clean format of you hdd/ssd.

[Dudefoxlive]

that is what i did.  i ran dban as i wanted to make sure what ever crap the virus might have felt want completely gone.  sadly i think this drive is on its way out.  the drive it self is like 5 or 6 years old so i am not to surprised.